经济学人下载:公司政治献金拨云见日

Corporate political donations Lighten our darkness
公司政治献金拨云见日

There are big differences in what firms reveal about their political donations
政治献金信息披露因公司而异

IT IS not just the incestuous make-up of News Corporation's board that annoys its shareholders.
不仅仅是新闻集团董事会排外的组织结构让其股东感到懊恼，

Activist investors such as the Nathan Cummings Foundation also complain about the firm's lack of transparency about its political donations.
就连诸如内森·卡明斯基基金会这样的投资积极分子也抱怨该公司在其政治献金项目上缺乏透明度。

Although News Corp opened up a bit this year,
尽管,今年新闻集团对该项目透露了稍许信息，

it is still more opaque than its peers in the S&P 100, as a new index of corporate political disclosure shows.
但是根据一项新的旨在披露公司政治捐赠行为的指数显示，新闻集团较其在标准普尔500指数上市的同行们显得更加不透明。

The index, launched by the Robert Zicklin Centre for Corporate Integrity at Baruch College on September 15th,
9月15日，由纽约市立大学巴鲁克学院的罗伯特金科林企业诚信中心发布了该指数。

does not argue that corporate political donations are good or bad.
该指数并未表明赞同抑或否定公司政治捐赠行为的意见。

But its compilers believe that the public and shareholders have a right to know what firms are up to.
但是该指数的众多编者相信公众和股东有权利知道公司做出捐赠决议的理由。

It looks at 57 measures of transparency, including how many clicks it takes to get from the firm's website to information about political donations and how detailed that information is.
指数考察了57项透明度指标，其中包括为获得公司政治捐赠信息而产生的公司网页点击量及信息的详细程度。

News Corp is one of 28 companies rated “opaque”,
新闻集团是28家被评为不透明的公司之一，

along with popular bogeymen such as Halliburton and Walmart—and fashionable firms such as Amazon, Berkshire Hathaway, Google, Nike and Walt Disney.
这些公司还包括诸如哈利伯顿和沃尔玛这样受人欢迎的怪物公司，以及亚马逊、伯克希尔·哈撒韦公司、谷歌、耐克和迪斯尼这样的新贵公司。

Only a handful of firms were deemed “transparent”, including Colgate-Palmolive, IBM, Pfizer and Goldman Sachs.
仅有部分公司被该指数认为是透明的，这包括高露洁、国际商业机器有限公司，瑞辉制药有限公司和高盛银行。

Finance is, surprisingly, the third-most-transparent industry, behind drugs and oil.
令人惊奇的是，金融业位列透明度第三的产业，居于制药业和石油行业之后。

Mining, manufacturing and utilities are the most opaque.
采矿业、制造业及公用事业是最不透明的行业。

As firms donate more to politicians, they tend to disclose more.
鉴于公司对政客的捐赠行为越来越多，他们倾向于披露更多的信息。

Yet the very biggest donors are not the most transparent,
作为该指数创始人之一唐纳德·施皮尔斯说，尽管最大的献主是那些最不透明的公司，

says Donald Schepers, one of the creators of the index, which they aim to expand next year to cover the entire S&P 500.
但他们打算明年将该指数拓展到囊括所有的标准普尔500公司。

That said, several firms have “made big improvements in their disclosure since we wrote to tell them that we were doing the index,” says Mr Schepers. That alone suggests that measuring transparency is worthwhile.
施皮尔斯说，由于被告知他们正在编排该指数，一些公司改善了政治捐赠项目的信息披露状况。仅此就表明对透明度的衡量是值得的。